The Nation: Pastoral Poverty; The Seeds of Decline

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: December 8, 2002

Correction Appended

LOUP COUNTY, Neb., the poorest county in the nation, is down to 712 people -- a third of the population it had nearly a century ago. A four-bedroom house goes for $30,000. But building a life is much harder. In Loup County, what rides on the unrelenting winds are symptoms of despair that have taken hold there and across a large swath of rural America.

It could be Chemung County in upstate New York, which lost people and jobs even in the boom of the 90's. Or Bighorn County, Wyo., where some high school seniors say their only choices are to move out of town or take up with people cooking methamphetamine in a rusty sink. Or Dalhart, Tex., a Panhandle town of 7,000 people where the murder rate last year was more than twice the national average.

Around the country, rural ghettos are unravelling in the same way that inner cities did in the 1960's and 70's, according to the officials and experts who have tried to make sense of a generations-old downward spiral in the countryside. In this view, decades of economic decline have produced a culture of dependency, with empty counties hooked on farm subsidies just as welfare mothers were said to be tied to their monthly checks. And just as in the cities, the hollowed-out economy has led to a frightening rise in crime and drug abuse.

But unlike the cities' troubles, which generated a national debate about causes and solutions, the rural collapse has been largely silent, perhaps because it happened so slowly.

Crime, fueled by a methamphetamine epidemic that has turned fertilizer into a drug lab component and given some sparsely populated counties higher murder rates than New York City, has so strained small-town police budgets that many are begging the federal government for help. The rate of serious crime in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Utah is as much as 50 percent higher than the state of New York, the F.B.I. reported in October.

Towns of 10,000 and 25,000 people are now the most likely places to experience a bank robbery. Drug-related homicides fell by 50 percent in urban areas, but they tripled over the last decade in the countryside.

''We have serious drug crime in places that never used to have it,'' said Allen Curtis, executive director of the Nebraska Crime Commission.

Poverty was held in place somewhat by the boom of the 1990's. Still, the 2000 census found that the percentage of people living below the poverty level is nearly 30 percent higher in rural areas than it is in cities. Of the 25 poorest counties in the nation, 5 are in Nebraska, 5 are in Texas and 4 are in South Dakota, the Commerce Department found. In Loup County, the dead center of Nebraska, per capita personal income is $6,606 per year, just 22 percent of the national average, according to a listing compiled by the Commerce Department.

Equally telling is a growing wage gap that finds people who work in rural areas making just 70 percent of the average salaries of workers in urban areas. The cost of living, of course, is much lower outside the big cities. But workers in rural areas are 60 percent more likely to earn minimum wage than urban wage-earners.

No wonder then that the exodus from large parts of rural America is continuing, extending far beyond the long-suffering Great Plains. While the nation as a whole grew by 13 percent in the 2000 census, many counties in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and three Southern states, for example, lost 9 percent or more of their population during the 1990's.

THE pastoral farms of cider presses and pumpkin patches still exist, of course, but the ones that prosper are at suburban edges, or they are places with sublime scenery or an energetic college. Bonner County, Idaho, for example, grew by 38 percent in the last decade, hooking its fate to outdoor amenities and second homes for early-retiring baby boomers.

Though the politicians who inveighed against moral and economic decline in the big cities have yet to weigh in on rural breakdown, plenty of voices are sounding alarms from this Other America.

Some say that entrepreneurship has been stifled by central government subsidies to agribusiness, while the real problems of rural America -- which have little to do with farm policy -- have been ignored.

''The slide is not inevitable,'' said Chuck Hassebrook, director of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Neb., a nonprofit group that studies trends in rural areas. ''We give a lot of tax breaks and direct payments to big agriculture companies that don't do much for the local economy, but rarely do we give anything to the little guy trying to start a business and stay in town.''

In Nebraska, nearly 70 percent of all farmers rely on government largess to stay in business. Yet the biggest economic collapse is happening in counties most tied to agriculture -- in spite of the subsidies.

Unaffected by the downward trends are cheap labs used to make methamphetamine, a synthetic form of speed that the White House calls the fastest-growing drug threat in America.

Correction: December 15, 2002, Sunday An article last Sunday about rural poverty misidentified the home state of Representative Eva Clayton, who was chairwoman of the Congressional Rural Caucus. It is North Carolina, not South Carolina.